E-Commerce Web Hosting
The fundamental elements for an e-commerce website include: plenty of transfer bandwidth, shopping cart scripts, and payment gateway integrations. An e-commerce web site can be built on either a Unix web host or a Windows-based hosting plan. Since Unix is the most popular hosting platform, the following chart also appears on the Unix Shared Web Hosting page.
E-Commerce Hosting Prices
| Rank | Provider | Price | Space | Bandwidth | # of Domains / # Free Domains* |
Setup | Email Accts. | Review |
1 |
$3.95 |
100 GB |
1000 GB |
Unlimited / 1 |
Free |
2500 |
||
2 |
$4.95 |
200 GB |
2000 GB |
Unlimited / 1 |
Free |
5000 |
||
3 |
$5.95 |
200 GB |
2000 GB |
6 / 1 |
Free |
5000 |
||
4 |
$5.95 |
50 GB |
750 GB |
10 / 1 |
Free |
Unlimited |
||
5 |
$6.95 |
200 GB |
2000 GB |
6 / 1 |
Free |
2500 |
||
6 |
$6.95 |
250 GB |
2500 GB |
2 / 1 |
Free |
Unlimited |
||
7 |
$6.95 |
49 GB |
999 GB |
10 / 1 |
Free |
Unlimited |
||
8 |
$5.77** |
40 GB |
800 GB |
Unlimited / 1 |
Free |
Unlimited |
||
9 |
$7.95 |
25 GB |
1500 GB |
1 / 1 |
Free |
Unlimited |
||
10 |
$9.95 |
100 GB |
1000 GB |
Unlimited / 1 |
Free |
Unlimited |
About E-Commerce Hosting
E-Commerce hosting isn't so much a term describing a type of hosting setup, but really describes the purpose and activities of a clients' web-presence. Fundamentally any site could potentially be an E-Commerce site, almost regardless of hosting provider. What defines an E-Commerce setup is the overall setup of the site and host.
Some companies obtain a web-presence simply to represent their company on the web, sort of like a digital business card. It is when a company wants to really incorporate their products or services into their website when the term E-Commerce arises. Acting as an E-Commerce site, a company will normally need several fundamental elements. A shopping-cart, where products or services can be added, prices tallied, taxes calculated, and discounts applied. After the shopping cart is established a payment gateway is usually attained to process payments and billing. Some common gateways include; credit card merchant accounts, PayPal, etc. Almost all hosting packages now include a shopping cart and many have evolved to allow seamless integration from the cart to the payment gateway. As far as finding a finding a host to use, virtually all hosting packages can be developed into an E-Commerce presence.